Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great concept sunk by thin characters & ludicrous plot twis, 4 Aug 1999
By A Customer
I'm a relatively new convert to Crews, but this was the worst of the four books I've read to date. He sets up a great concept to skewer the zeal of salesmen and corporate America, and the first third of the book does grab you, but it soon dissolves into wanderlust. Characters you would have liked to seen fully sketched out and explained are merely pencilled in, and the ending is one of the weakest and unsatisfactory of ANY novel I've read recently. I like it when Crews leaves something to the imagination, but here it just seems like laziness. Mulch this book and pick up "Celebration" or "The Knock-Out Artist" instead.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Compost this book, 16 Dec 1998
By A Customer
Hey, I LIKE Crews but this book stinks, and its a pity because it starts out good, but it runs into a tough patch and just keeps getting deeper and deeper in it. Every writer has his flaws, and often they are intimately related to his strengths; but played improperly as it were. That's sort of what happens here. Crews starts to work his magic, creating cracker archetypes from a few glimpses, a phrase, a cliche, and a heavy dose of alchemy; but the thing falls apart. The characters never form, they have nothing to do, nowhere to go and too much time to get there, which turns out to be the worst of this calamity because as a consequence they have entirely too much too say about nothing to each other while they wander about committing felony non sequitur for 200 or so pages. I've never seen Crews stumble like this, but this book reads like a novel one reads in spurts over a couple of months: you keep having trouble tying it together and wonder if you've forgotten something. Well, if nothing else it serves to illuminate just how magical Crews other work is, because this reads like a half assed attempt to emulate him. Kind of makes one wonder, after all Jerzy Kosinski...nah..never mind. Oh well, he's recovered now with Celebration, and presumably the new book,so no great loss, but don't waste your time or money on this one unless you are so into Crews that you want to see what happens when he flounders
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An insane, inspired look at corporate America, 16 Sep 1998
By A Customer
I had the wrong impression of this book. I thought it was one of those character portraits, eccentric and revealing, at least of the poor sclub which it details. Wow, was I wrong. I was right that it was eccentric, but it was so in a completely different fashion from what I'd imagined. 'The Mulching Of America' is an absurdist fantasy in all senses of the word but, at heart it really is quite a clever commentary. I recommend this book for it's inventiveness, if not for it's ridiculousness.
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